Anthropology Times

Japanese Sociolinguistics
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 16: 261-278 (Volume publication date October 1987)
J S Shibamoto
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

My dearest lady, my light,

I hope you do not think me mean, wicked and stupid for addressing you with such intimacy.  Generally I’ve found that my non-American friends are less put off by intimacy in letter writing, the same with artists and literature majors of any nationality.  Reading some of your correspondence yesterday, even more so than I had hoped, it was as if I were reading my own heart.  I know that this is plain and common to say, so forgive me, please.  And forgive me again because what follows may read as if it were shot out of a cannon.  Mondays have become a busier day for me and I have yet to adjust my schedule.  I have an opportunity to do community volunteer work on Mondays and I didn’t want to keep putting that off until I had my schedule here adjusted, meaning mainly that I write on Sunday what I want to post on Monday.  For now, it’s still the mad dash.  I hope to integrate more of my thoughts about your work into my thinking on anthropology as I actually read more of your work.  This week I read “Japanese Socioliguistics.”

I haven’t watched much anime recently, but reading “Japanese Sociolinguistics,” I wanted to rewatch some things.  Janet Shibamoto explores some of the findings of various language research projects in Japan and it seemed to me that I recognized some of the patterns discussed from watching the anime in translation — Women use formal language more than men; older people speak differently; women are addressed with more politeness than men of the same status in the workplace.

With one anime series, Ranma 1/2, based on the manga of the same name by Rumiko Takahashi, it seemed that the subtitle company took more pains to translate some of the cultural language through manipulation of English-speaking patterns than did the dubbing company.  For example, it would seem that the upper class characters not only used more formal language, their language was also often more poetic, more reverential.  The subtitles were not only more likely to be in verse, but the language used was more “literary,” for lack of a better word.  If I had watched the series more recently, I might have more plentiful examples.  I used to watch with both subtitles and dubbing to make note of the differences.

The title character Ranma, a teenager, and his father were spending a year in China looking for opportunities to improve their martial arts techniques, when Ranma fell into a magical spring in which a young maiden had drowned.  After having fallen into the spring, Ranma is transformed into a young maiden whenever he is splashed with cold water (a light rain will do it).  He returns to his male body when splashed with hot water.  He and the father return to Japan so that Ranma can meet his arranged bride-to-be, one of the daughters of the father’s former martial arts mate.  The mate’s family is aware of Ranma’s predicament, but all work to hide this from the wider community.

When Ranma is in girl-form, his/her style of speech seems much the same as when in boy-form in that it is less polite than when other females speak.  What I don’t know is whether girl-Ranma uses feminine Japanese language in other ways, which according to Shibamoto includes things such as “special self-reference and address terms, special sentence-ending particles and exclamations, a particular pitch range and set of intonations, frequent use of the honorific style, avoidance of kango (Sino-Japanese lexical items), and avoidance of vulgar language.”  Well, girl-Ranma definitely doesn’t avoid vulgar language.

Shibamoto mentions that there had been only budding interests in biliingualism and minority language in Japanese linguistic studies, but “with the internationalization of Japanese business, increasing numbers of Japanese families are spending some years in foreign countries, and the language problems of the children in these families upon returning to Japan have stimulated some interest…”  This review was published in 1987; Ranma 1/2 was televised from 1989 to 1992.  The characters that had spent significant amounts of time out of the country, Ranma and his father as well as a school teacher who had spent a great deal of time in Hawaii, seemed to have some differences in speech.  I would be curious to know whether their Japanese seemed more “foreign” somehow.  I listened to the show in Japanese (with subtitles) sometimes in order to hear the language, but I don’t have very much Japanese.

Shibamoto cautions on several occasions that although the methods of data analysis used in the Japanese studies were often quite advanced, the data-collection techniques were often questionable.  For example, many early studies relied heavily on self-reported language use from the informants with little or no direct observation of language use.  In some instances, it seems that later studies with better data collection methods confirmed the findings of earlier studies.

I hope to have more French soon.  I enjoyed the cross-cultural aspects of your correspondence with Nelson Algren.  I started reading some of your letters to Sartre as well, hoping to compare the two as far as cultural expression.  What a treat it was to find that you wrote to Nelson in English, and sprinkled with bits of French to encourage him to learn French.  I find it encourages me.

One of your many adorers,
S.

Advances in Evolutionary Culture Theory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 187-210 (Volume publication date October 1990)
William H. Durham
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Reading “Evolutionary Culture Theory,” I started thinking more about my own ideas of how cultures emerge and develop.  I relate well to the presented premise that all cultures sprang forth from a common ancestral culture.  Durham concisely explains evolutionary culture theory (ECT) during his concluding remarks:

Evolutionary culture theory is based on the premise that, however else [cultures] may be related, all cultural systems are related by descent.  In other words, a long and unbroken chain of cultural transmission connects each of the world’s extant cultural systems with a single common ancestor; however remote and obscure the ties may be,all cultures have “descended with modification” from this one original culture.

Durham states that the main questions in ECT have to with why so many cultures, more than 4000, have branched from the one culture and with the pace and mechanism with with that change occurred.  Durham labels these as questions of differentiation and transformation respectively.  In writing about differentiation Durham asks why so many cultures instead of “simply one global human culture.”  This question struck a nerve with me as I’ve often toyed with the idea of whether we’re moving in the direction of having one global culture.  I then started to think of culture development in terms of the Big Bang.

What if cultures developed along the lines of the development of the universe?  Think of cultures being galaxies exploding forth from one dense, concentrated ancestral culture.  The galaxies/cultures move apart from each other, but there is within-culture cohesion.  Maybe new cultures form in like fashion to the formation of new galaxies.  My first Internet searches with the words “Big Bang” and “culture” turned up a lot of links on the TV show, “The Big Bang Theory,” and then with a bit of refining I can across a post by Howard Bloom titled The Big Bang And The Birth Of Culture in which he describes the Big Bang as a social event:

The story of how culture emerged way, way back when begins with the Big Bang. Culture is a social thing. And this has never been a cosmos of loners. From the git-go 13.7 billion years ago it’s been a social universe, a cosmos of tight, intimate bunches, of massive mobs, and of huge communities. The Big Bang was profoundly social.

Edward Blair Bolles critiques an article by Ian Tattersall in the American Museum of Natural History that speaks of Speech’s Big Bang:

[Tattersall] argues that the use of symbols was an invention, the fruit of some insight, that led to an eruption of cultural behavior — the production of rock art, creation of decorative beads, etc. Although it would be a long time before speech would become written language, language is assumed to have been born when symbols were invented.

More and more I think that will have to study linguistics whether I want to or not.  Anyway, in thinking of culture and the Big Bang, I mostly thought of the idea of one global culture and how that may relate to scenarios that predict that the universe would expand for a while before collapsing back to its original state which lead me to think of human technological advancement as being driven, moved, directed by innate demands to coalesce back into one culture… roads, vehicles, telecommunication, boats, planes, the Internet, the types of ideas captured in art and literature all working toward forming this one global culture.  This is a line of thinking to which I definitely wish to return.  I believe that this model could be helpful to my understanding and I look forward to investigating and developing it more.

Conversation Analysis
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 283-307 (Volume publication date October 1990)
Charles Goodwin and John Heritage
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

I chose to read “Conversation Analysis” in part because I’ve gotten a little behind in my reading and I thought that I would have quick, easily produced comments given that I had bumped into the subject of conversation analysis while reading “Language and Dispute.”  I came across an Introduction to Conversation Analysis by Charles Antaki while reading the latter article.  The site has a brief description of the field as well as a tutorial with audio and video, sample transcriptions, instructions on making notations, and sample analyses.  The site provides a gentle introduction to some of the same names and sources mentioned in the review article and seen on the Wikipedia page on conversation analysis.  The site is fun and light and assumes no specific prior knowledge of the field.  The review article wasn’t quite so fun and light, but that was to be expected. Reading “Conversation Analysis” I wasn’t particularly drawn toward the quick, easily produced commentary I had in mind (a glossy overview of a specific conversational interaction).

What I most noticed when reading “Conversation Analysis” was that the authors didn’t seem to have the same angst about descriptive vs. theoretical concerns as the author in “The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality.”  The data of conversation analysis consists of audio or video recordings of real life interactions, not laboratory productions and the analyses are very descriptive.  Conversation analysts seem very comfortable with that type of work being of real value.  Goodwin and Heritage write the following:

[Conversation analysis] seeks to describe (my emphasis) the underlying social organization–conceived as an institutionalized substratum of interactional rules, procedures, and conventions–through which orderly and intelligible social interaction is made possible.

I expected to find discussions along the lines of how the length of a pause before an audible response to a question might say something about the nature of the response and that’s what I found:

An initial finding is that different kinds of responsive actions (e.g. agreements/ vs disagreements) are performed in markedly different ways.  While agreements are usually performed promptly and in intensified form, disagreements are delayed and mitigated in a variety of ways.

While Goodwin and Heritage did discuss some of the theoretical underpinnings and disciplinary exclusions that gave birth to the field of conversation analysis, they manage to keep that discussion within the limited context of giving background information.  That discussion doesn’t take over and shape the whole review.

Why not close on a joke?  In similar fashion to the analysis of pause before agreement/disagreement above, Jerry Seinfeld tells a joke describing the relationship between the length of a pause after asking for a favor and the size of the favor:

There’s two types of favors, the big favor and the small favor.  You can measure the size of the favor by the pause that a person takes after they ask you to ‘do me a favor.’  Small favor, small pause.  Can you do me a favor, hand me that pencil?  No pause at all.  Big favors are, ‘Could you do me a favor…’ (huge pause, followed by closing credits.) (link)

Language and Disputing
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 17: 221-237 (Volume publication date October 1988)
D Brenneis
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

“Language and Disputing” is a more sparse review than previous reviews I’ve read in that it is more directive than expositive (and shorter–10 pages of text).  Whereas in “Death: A Cross Cultural Study” the writers list classical schools of thought regarding the study of death followed by a discussion of each, the writer in “Language and Disputing” would direct one to a source in which a good discussion of classical schools could be found along with a sentence or two as to what makes that source of particular interest.  While I learned a lot about the types of literature available in the area of language and disputing, there was less to be soaked up from this review on its face.  Still there was enough to enrich and inform my reading and experiences.

Brenneis’ discussion of a debate between legal anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists concerning which research data is most important to share with the public provides a parallel to a discussion of literary writing.  Brenneis notes that legal anthropologists tend to focus on what is being said believing the language to be fairly transparent, while linguistic anthropologists tend to focus on how it is being said believing that analysis of verbatim language is necessary to interpretation.  A study of literature teaches and reinforces the value of both those views.  When studying the plays of Shakespeare one learns the value of the more transparent story as well as the one to be had in the subtext.  Further, one learns the value of the interaction between the two and how the one informs the other.  Brenneis makes an observation about dispute language that could equally apply to the study of literature:

Understanding the role of dispute language requires attention not only to what is said but also to how it is said and to how various speakers’ performances are linked.

When I read the above quote, I was immediately put in mind of a discussion on Roger Ebert’s blog that lead to the short volley regarding the value of literature mentioned below.  Ebert wrote a posts titled “Video Games Can Never Be Art” with a followup post about an informal poll asking his readers to choose whether they valued “a great video game” over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “Video games 13, 823, Huck Finn, 8,088.”  One commenter to the latter post asks, among other things, “How are you improved in any way after reading Huck Finn, as opposed to reading a plot summary of the book?” Ebert gives this response:

Plot summary? A book is not about what it is about. It’s about how it’s about it.

I suppose this sounds “elitist,” but here goes: Based on your comment, you have never learned to read.

Ebert’s response echoes Brenneis’ observation above.  One could write that dispute language isn’t just about what it’s about.  It’s about how it’s about it.  Brenneis continues with echoes of Ebert:

While past events may be discussed and accounted for in court testimony such language is about (Brenneis’ emphasis) earlier stages; it does not reproduce what was actually said.”

Having the details or “plot summary” of a dispute is one part, but the exact wording of the dispute, the pattern of the volley between disputants, the tone, the rhythm, provide valuable interpretive information.  In reading literature one learns about text, subtext, fine distinctions between synonyms, how shades of meaning can create hills and valleys of ambiguity.

Reading Brenneis didn’t just give me insight on the value of good literature, I also found a pithy example of what makes good television good.  Good television comments on and illuminates the workings of culture.  Brenneis writes the following:

Schiffrin’s examination of the characteristics and functions of argument in Jewish American conversation has been particularly effective in showing that apparently contentious speech can further sociability as well as disagreement.

An episode of the television show Frasier, “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz”, provides a perfect illustration of Schiffrin’s findings.  The character Martin says of the apparently contentious interaction between Frasier’s Jewish girlfriend and her mother that it was “all emotional and messy and then they’re hugging and then it’s all over.”  When Frasier and Martin find themselves in a similar conversation, they discover that they lack the (Jewish) cultural skills to arrive at the same sociable result:

A transcript of this episode from season six of Frasier can he found here.

(In case you’re wondering: 1. I believe that video gaming can be art, not to say that there is a good example of that just yet.  2. Currently, I would chose Huck Finn over a great video game.   This discussion over at Ebert’s blog is actually pretty rich with thoughtful commentary and makes for a good place to observe dispute language in action, both high and low brow.  Huck Finn is the book mentioned because Mark Twain delayed finishing Huck Finn in favor of working on a game he was developing,  prompting Ebert to assert that no game would be worth not having Huck Finn.)